2025.02 VMA
- Date: 2025-02-28
- Time: 12:00-14:00
- Moderator: Martine
- Venue: Jitsi Meet
- This VMA planning forum entry: https://forum.riot-os.org/t/vma-2025-02-planning/4460
- Previous VMA notes forum entry: Notes: Virtual Maintainer Assembly (VMA) 2024.11
Attendees
- Martine
- Kevin
- Teufelchen
- mikolai
- Koen
- benpicco
- Emmanuel
- Christian
- Dylan
- Karl
Agenda
- Agenda Bashing - 5’ (Martine)
- 2025.01 Release Debrief - 5’ (Kevin)
- Outlook on Upcoming 2025.04 Release - 5’ (Mikolai)
- Upcoming Roles - 5’ (Martine)
- 2025.07 Release Manager
- 2025.05 VMA Moderator
- EU Cyberresilience Act and Lobbying in Brussels - 10’ (Martine)
- Martine was approached about a person who is lobbying for “the FOSS community” in Brussels
- Should we get into contact with them so they can represent us explicitly?
- Consolidate Forum Moderator Role into (Community) Maintainers - 15’ (Martine)
- Ask Karin and MCR to also become Community Maintainers
- Reapproaching c. (potential maintainer) - 5’ (Martine)
- CI access for non-maintainer - 10’ (Mikolai)
- concrete case: Georg @ TUD
- can we give some rights somehow?
- Maintainer Discussions Should be in Public Channels - 15’ (Martine)
- Read-only for non-maintainers?
- How to do “read-only” at VMA?
- Updating RIOT Roadmap - 30’ (Mikolai)
- can we agree on an updated roadmap?
- if not, remove outdated one at Roadmap
Notes
Agenda Bashing
- Notetaking: Benpicco, Mikolai, Christian
2025.01 Release Debrief
- Kevin: not much progress on improving release process, but everything went through quite smoothly anyhow
- IoT lab responsive when issues popped up
Outlook on Upcoming 2025.04 Release
- ~7.04. soft freeze, hard freeze week after that
- native aliasing (automatic native32/native64 selection)
Upcoming Roles
2025.05 VMA Moderator
- Kevin will do it
2025.07 Release Manager- it’s Teufelchen
EU Cyberresilience Act and Lobbying in Brussels
- Martine: Contacts to c-base, Jens Ohlig (johl), contacts to “Open Source Community” lobbying. Does it make sense for us as a community to speak with them directly?
- (some nodding)
- Martine: Who would do that? Can do but am not deep in there.
- benpicco: What would be the goal? Isn’t that already passed? There was FOSDEM workshop; not so happy about it. AIU will come into law at (date). Will mean that CE also applies to Cyberresilience act.
- Martine: talked to johl 2w ago.
- Karl: Still needs to be put into law.
- benpicco: Would be interested, don’t know what it will be about, it’s vague.
- emmanuel: Can also participate.
- Martine: Will approach johl telling we have 2-3 ppl to talk to.
Consolidate Forum Moderator Role into (Community) Maintainers
- Martine: From writing down governance docs: currently, we have forum moderators, and maybe matrix moderators, maybe formalize these into community maintainers
- Martine: Are Community Maintainers the same as Forum Moderators?
- Koen: two pieces of extra context. We do have 2nd draft about moderator roles (my last input November 2020); (?) had conscious decision to have moderators separate from maintainers.
- Martine: merge this into governance.md
- Koen (agrees)
- Martine: should we consolidate into community maintainers?
- chrysn: we shouldn’t formalize and split these roles too much. People whom we generally trust as maintainers are maintainers; then if someone wants to participate in forum moderation they get that box ticked, and most maintainers will want to exercise upload (merge/review) rights, but some may not want to exercise that.
- Martine: So, don’t consolidate, but extend what maintainers are and open up for non-uploading maintainer?
Reapproaching c.
- Originally approached in https://forum.riot-os.org/t/new-maintainer-proposal-elided/4424/8
- Martine: c. declined offer to be but is still active; make sense to re-approach?
- see thread; maribu preferred someone else to reapproach him.
- Koen: just ask if they want merge access, like maintainer-but-opt-out-of-extras.
- chrysn: maybe not push, just note that offer is open.
- Martine: Who wants to reapproach? Will do
CI access for non-maintainer
- mikolai: Student at TUD who wants to get into CI. Don’t have someone who feels responsible (with Kaspar saying he won’t work there).
- Teufelchen: Wanted to take over but didn’t put in effort yet.
- mikolai: He’s not part of community yet, not a maintainer.
- chrysn: Let’s just do that. You know them, fine with delegating that out of maintainer group.
- Kevin: You also don’t need that, you can set up a copy, all you need is some DNS entry. When I was playing around with it, there was one private Murdock key distributed to all machines. Wouldn’t be happy giving that one out, but if it’s just a matter of adding a separate key, that shouldn’t be a blocker.
- Koen: I think there’s a config somewhere that says that “if you’re a maintainer you’re allowed to press more buttons”. But am with chrysn: If someone is willing to work on it, great.
- Martine: We have a CI team, can add there and configure members there to have same rights than maintainers.
- mikolai: Great. As for talking to people, had mixed responses in CI chat.
- Kevin: Nobody feels super responsible; unicasting might work better. Happy to try to help where I’ve been. Maybe Teufelchen dug deeper in some parts.
- Teufelchen: Was surprisingly difficult to set things up locally, and went out of time with it.
- Koen: can also participate some knowledge.
- Conclusion: We’ll try, and try to be responsive.
- (and student can ping / mail / try set up meeting with Koen / Kevin)
- Martine: Will add him into CI, then let’s see what more it takes.
Maintainer Discussions Should be in Public Channels
- Martine: Was discussed previously, came up related to Governance document.
- Martine: Should we make maintainers forum / chat public? Silent participation in VMA?
- benpicco: Sometimes we discuss things in maintainer chat that should be in public chat. But chat should stay private. For VMA, if someone wants to listen in, let them.
- emmanuel: Agree on having a private channel, but better triage what goes where. Ad VMA, initially they were extension of GA which is public. So public was the idea.
- Teufelchen: You weren’t strict.
- chrysn: Let’s just open up the VMA. On the notes, should edit them when it’s about non-maintainers.
- Martine: So keep maintainer forum private, but post VMA stuff publicly?
- emmanuel: Also other things, “does this have to be on the private channel?”
- Conclusion: Private channels except VMA stay private, but be more aware of what to post where.
Updating RIOT Roadmap
-
mikolai: Was asked about roadmap, and some looks outdated.
-
mikolai: If we can’t update it, we should remove it.
-
Martine: Discussed a lot in past VMAs, but nobody ever feels responsible for it. Also doesn’t reflect the way we approach problems: We see something missing, do it.
-
chrysn: Maybe what we need is not discussion about the nature of the roadmap, but having everyone go through their items for 5min after (future: before) a VMA.
- mikolai: Also it’s more a feature tracker, not broader topics. Not sure how helpful that is.
- Kevin: Does look messy. Clean up.
- mikolai: PRs on GitHub are easier to keep updated.
- Martine: Looked at it; most of what I’m in I don’t feel responsible for any more.
- emmanuel: RIOT had no roadmap for a long time. Not sure cleaning that up will solve it. (?) Unless we can maintain it, let’s rather not have one.
- Karl: Rather than removing, there was intention behind the initial question. Make roadmap serve its original purpose
- mikolai: So not so much about what is going to happen in 3 years, but what people are doing. Been asked about “what is something easy to start working on RIOT”
- chrysn: Fine if agree to dissolve, but then give chance for people to move their items into tracker (mine are active, collaborating with Ariel).
- mikolai: Label on issues that reflects “high-level goal”?
- Martine: There is “feature” tracker label
- chrysn: “feature” is everything that’s not a bug; if abandon roadmap, have some high-level label
- Martine: “Process:tracking(?)”
- mikolai: At least it’s not a static list in repo’s docs/
- benpicco: “roadmap” implies someone is working on it
- Karl: easier to track PRs
- Martine, concluding: Move roadmap into issue tracker under to-be-created label.
- Martine: can discuss outcome at next VMA.
AOB
- mikolai: Teufelchen and I will be at embedded world, joint with Barkhausen Institut (Dresden research institute working on microkernel OS). If you’re nearby, drop by. Will post on mastodon too (via chrysn / send details)
- benpicco: maribu and I (and mikolai) will be at Chemnitzer Linuxtage
- Martine: reuse demos! BTHome demo might be interesting, esp. at CLT.
